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  • Series Introduction
  • Beth Buggenhagen, series editor

This issue marks the debut of a new feature of Africa Today through which we highlight the work of our long-serving past editors who have recently retired from the journal and from their academic positions at Indiana University. Here, we reflect on their contributions to shaping the journal since it came to Indiana University Press in 1999. Editing a journal is often a labor of love, a service to the discipline in which time is borrowed from one's own scholarly work to edit, publish, and promote the work of colleagues moving the discipline forward in new directions.

Thanks to the dedicated efforts of editors over the years, Africa Today has been a long-running journal in African studies; it was founded in 1954. We are thus publishing these interviews as we head into the seventieth anniversary of Africa Today, in 2024. An anniversary presents an opportunity to take stock and consider new initiatives. In this feature, we begin by acknowledging the clarity, rigor, and breadth that these former editors brought to the pages of the journal through their energetic and thoughtful editorial hand.

In 1999, when Africa Today moved to from Lynne Rienner Publishers to Indiana University Press, a multidisciplinary team took up its editorship. The editors consisted of York Bradshaw, a sociologist, Gracia Clark, an anthropologist, John Hanson, a historian, and Ruth Stone, an ethnomusicologist. Their first volume arrived with a new cover, featuring the continent in vibrant hues of purple and gold, and a new heft, which came with additional pages reflecting an expanded focus, reshaping Africa Today as a venue for scholarly work from a broad range of disciplines in African Studies. From their first issue, the editorial practices of this group of scholars transformed Africa Today into a journal that would reflect the breadth of African studies by extending its reach beyond the social sciences to the arts and humanities. Throughout the years, the journal captured contemporary debates and offered fresh insights.

Importantly, the editors enhanced Africa Today's status as an international journal that attracted and reflected the scholarship of intellectuals based on the continent and in the diasporas and elsewhere. In part, this scope can be attributed to the scholarly reach of each of these editors, enmeshed in academic collaborations on and off the African continent throughout their careers.

In this issue, we recognize the editorship of Gracia Clark, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. Dr. Clark edited Africa Today from 1999 [End Page 96] until 2007. Under her supervision, Africa Today published original, timely, thought-provoking research articles. Dr. Clark is interviewed by Dr. Sarah Monson, a linguistic anthropologist with a PhD in anthropology from Indiana University and a former student of Dr. Clark's. Dr. Monson researches Asante women's business strategies in Ghana's Kumasi Central Market.

These interviews offer a window into intergenerational conversations about developments in African studies. They also offer a window into the individual careers of the editors and their impact on the field through their students. In subsequent issues, we shall feature interviews with Dr. Ruth Stone, who joined Africa Today as an editor in 1999, Dr. Maria Grosz-Ngaté, who joined Africa Today as an editor in 2002, and Drs. Eileen Julien and Patrick McNaughton, who joined Africa Today as editors in 2008. [End Page 97]

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